Stockholm Syndrome 2- 17 Black and 29 Red (12 page)

 

She gave him one of those funny mum-looks, exasperation and amusement and love. "What the hell am I meant to do with it?"

 

"I don't know. Whatever you want. You said you liked it."

 

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean you have to
buy
it for me, just because I like it."

 

"Why not?"

 

"I like Bali as well, are you going to buy me Bali?"

 

"If you want. I mean, I'll have to sell everything I own and take out a hellish mortgage... do you want Bali?"

 

She started laughing and it was amazing, he hadn't seen her really
laugh
like that for so long. "You bought me coffee, that'll do for now."

 

"It won't."

 

"Stop it." Serious again, as sudden as turning off a lamp. "Don't."

 

"But-"

 

"
Don't
."

 

"But-"

"Lindsay. That's what mothers
do
, they hang around waiting for their idiot sons to get more money than sense and then fuck up their lives so they can swoop in like Wonder Woman and fix it. It's the only time I've felt useful since you stopped falling off climbing frames and skinning your knees, please just let me have this one thing to hang over you for the rest of your life."

Disgusting and very very unwelcome mental image of his mother dressed up like Lynda Carter, then. He started laughing, he couldn't help it, it was the only thing that'd keep him from bawling his eyes out.

It's all different now, the second time. He forgot how quickly he got hooked before but he can't forget the agonising cold-turkey withdrawal when he made up his mind to stop, so he just doesn't make up his mind to stop. This was supposed to help, all this travelling. (Running away, he amends in his mind, who are you trying to fool?) It's not helping. The drugs aren't helping, not on his own, not now he's old and pathetic and wasting away in some supposed foreign paradise. He feels stupid, when he's sober enough to feel anything at all that isn't dozy warm euphoria. Things weren't meant to be like this. He never had a plan - he always
knew
something was going to go wrong, just not like this. It was meant to be a three musketeers thing, all for one, they'd get bored of it and retire and die together aged a hundred with all these stories locked up safe away from great-grandchildren who'd only pass them off as senile ramblings anyway. That or they'd go down together, muck up and die with bullets slamming third eyes into their foreheads. He thought the risk was worth it for the thrills they got through all the chases and plots and robberies, until his mother dragged him back to life. Until Valentine.

"Fucking
Valentine
," he mutters, voice trembling and weak under his breath because it's been too long since the last go. He stabs the woollen monkey through the face and chest with his old needle until it's dead. Until it
would
be dead if the fucking stupid thing was actually alive. God, he's starting to
think
like Valentine. Lindsay throws the thing into the corner of the room where it stares at him cheerfully through the floppy tangle of its limbs, watching him get his stuff ready until he can't take it any more and throws all four pillows off the bed and across the room to brick it up alive like Elizabeth Bathory.

***

It's easier when he runs out of cotton wool and all his needles are dull. Just don't go out and get more. Simple. He throws what's left of his stash out the window, as hard as he can like he's skimming a big pebble across a lake that's twenty stories up. He doesn't turn the telly on for the rest of the day in case there's a report on the news about somebody being killed by a zooming bullet of black tar falling out of the sky; he just stays in his bed, sleeping restlessly and scratching his arms to shreds.

It's not so bad as before. It's not nearly so bad. He's only been here... he has to check the date on his phone. It's only been seventeen days.

 

He types in some numbers. This is getting to be a habit and he's not sure whether it's any less dangerous.

 

"Elsie," he says when she answers, before she can even finish her hello. "Are we still on for that cup of coffee?"

 

"Where are you?" The line is clear. She could almost be right there in the room.

 

"Hell," he says, and she laughs a bit but not as if she finds anything funny.

 

"Phone your mum. She's worried."

 

"She's always fucking worried. She doesn't trust me."

 

"Should she?"

 

"That's not the point."

 

"Grow up." "That's the problem. Everything was easy when I was ten."

 

"When are you coming?"

 

"Give me some time. A week. Next Saturday. Are you busy?"

 

"Nothing that can't be cancelled."

He listens to her breathe for a while, covering his phone with his hand because he's irrationally paranoid that she might be doing the same thing. "I won't if you're busy."

"I said I'm not busy. Do you want me to pick you up at the airport?"

 

"I don't know what time. I'll hire something."

 

"Will you be in a fit state to drive?"

 

"Fuck off," he says quietly, and turns off his phone.

 

***

Lindsay considers hiring something really stupid to get from the airport to Ellie's place, a BMW convertible or a sleek scarlet Porsche just to show off to the girls, but he dismisses the idea quickly enough and gets... well, it's not a
lot
more sensible, but at least it's less obvious as a mid-life crisis. Jaguar XKR, deep blue instead of the maroon colour of the car he loves too much to sell but can't bear to drive any more. It's rotting in storage in Toulouse. There's probably still a stray knitting needle in the footwell and crumpled sweet wrappers in the door pocket; he couldn't bring himself to clear it out, only lock it up forever and try to forget it. Maybe it was a bad choice, this car. It feels the same, it sounds the same, it even somehow
smells
the same. The only thing missing is the idiot in the passenger seat.

It's easy to find the house. The car's satnav takes him straight to a wide, quiet street in the Montreal suburbs, purring directions at him in a disconcertingly attractive French accent, and as he pulls into the drive he sees two little faces at the window. He turns off the engine and gets out the car just as the front door is flung open and Katie runs at him like a rugby player, screeching his name. He picks her up when she throws herself at him because it's the only way to keep her momentum from knocking them both over, spins her round and sets her back on her feet so he can look at her - and then he regrets not having visited even
once
since they moved here, because she's barely even a child any more. She's eleven, tall like her mother with Ellie's long straight nose and Ty's piercing blue eyes and something about her mouth and smile he's only ever known as Katie.

"Why haven't you visited before?"

Always straight in with the tricky questions, kids. "I've just been busy, sweetheart." She tugs on his hand, pulling him to where the front door is still half-open, and then he gets his first look at it all - bookcases crammed with Harry Potter and battered Narnia paperbacks instead of the dusty things in the library in their old house which nobody had read for two hundred years, wide windows with bright scatter cushions on the seats, an upright piano in the hallway still with sheet music open. There's no sign of other people, until he sees a tiny girl with frizzy blonde hair peek at him from behind a door and then dart away again.

"Alice, don't be rude," Katie says. She sounds so aggravated and grown-up Lindsay has to fight not to smile in case it hurts her feelings.

 

"Alice doesn't know who I am. Do you want to introduce us?"

"You know Lindsay. Don't be so stupid, come here." She disappears into the room after her sister. Lindsay's not sure whether or not to follow, but then he hears footsteps on the staircase behind him and the decision is out of his hands.

"Tiens, un revenant..."

Ellie gets close enough to hug him hello while she's still standing on the lowest step; it makes her taller than he is and it's a strange, slightly awkward hug because of that, and maybe because of how long he's been away and what she knows or thinks she knows about what he's been doing. Even so, it's still a warm,
real
hug, lingering just a second too long.

"Sorry I'm late."

 

"Yeah, you could've helped us carry in some boxes."

 

"Anything still need doing?"

 

"Just go and put the kettle on."

Ten minutes later, properly armed with tea and Girl Guide cookies and listening to Alice jabber away at him as if they're old friends, it's like he never went away at all, like the years and women and needles never happened and he's always been here with them - at least until later on, when Katie and Alice are in bed and it's just him and Ellie left in the living room with the last of the cookies and a million and one conversations that can't all be started at once. He asks where Melissa is and Ellie tells him she's sleeping over with a friend and probably wouldn't want to see him anyway because she's going through that I-hate-the-world phase and she's started wearing too much black and pierced her own nose with a needle last week. She wants to know where he's been, how the world is doing, what's his favourite new place, and he tries to sound enthusiastic. Small-talk can only be dragged out for so long, though. In the end, Ellie sighs and starts twisting her hair up behind her head as if she just wants something to do with her fidgety hands.

"So what are you on right now?" she asks, securing the twist with a couple of pencils from the coffee table and not quite looking at him.

 

He considers trying to make a joke of it, but what's the point? "Right now? Nothing."

 

"When did you last?"

 

"The day before I phoned you. Eight days."

 

"Do you feel as shitty as you look?"

"I'm alright." He's not, but he damn well will be as soon as he stops feeling like he died three weeks ago and it's just taken his body this long to realise. "I wasn't doing it for too long. A couple of weeks, not a lot, just... enough."

"You're a fucking idiot."

 

"Yeah, I know."

 

"You swear on your mother's life you haven't brought any of that crap into my house?"

 

"Of course I haven't, I swear. My mother's life and father's grave, anything you want."

"Good." She visibly relaxes after that, some kind of tension in her face he hadn't even been aware of seems to ease. "Do you want to talk about anything?"

"No."

 

"You can if you want."

 

"No."

 

"Fine."

 

***

When it happens two months later, it's unplanned but kind of expected. The girls are all asleep. Lindsay brings Ellie a bedtime cup of tea like he's done every night since he came here, and he sits on the bed so they can talk about things that don't matter, just to make the quiet less lonely. She's going through her hair with an old-fashioned silver brush and Lindsay shifts right to the edge of the bed so he can take it out of her hand and do it himself. It doesn't
need
any more brushing. He does it anyway, and she lets him. She's wearing blue men's boxers and a white vest, and her dark gold hair falls smoothly down her back to rest just on that bare stripe of skin between the two. She shivers when he touches her there, and that's how it starts.

It feels inevitable, not quite like fate but something similar. Everybody else is gone. They've been friends a long time. He bought himself a vasectomy for a graduation present because he always knew he'd rather be dead than be a father and she had her tubes tied after Alice was born, so that problem doesn't exist. She's not allowed to find his needle scars repulsive because she's riddled with stretchmarks. Their minds aren't blown, they don't bring the roof crashing down, but it's sweet and comfortable. She's taller than Valentine. They match up better, there's no gurning face pressed against his collarbone. It's not the same as it was twenty years ago but he still remembers that trick with his tongue that makes her fall to bits, she still remembers how to stroke his back with the very tips of her fingers so he does the same.

"Now I know for
sure
ghosts don't exist," Ellie says after, when her hair's all in a mess again and she's resting her head on Lindsay's shoulder while he runs his fingers through the tangles. "He would've moved heaven and hell and everything in between to come and get you for that."

"Are you always going to think about him after?"

 

"Probably."

 

"Me too."

 

***

He never quite gets used to it. He has to go to a meeting with Melissa's teacher one time Ellie's sick and can't make it, and talks to this woman as if he's got some kind of influence over his girlfriend's bratty teenager's behaviour. The girls give him cards on Father's Day, although they never call him that. Ellie makes him laugh and keeps him sane and he does the same for her.

He's happy, but he's restless and itchy and doesn't know how to say so. Months drag past, slow like crawling slugs, then a whole year, and then another. Lindsay wonders if this is how Valentine felt in France, every ticking second like a sledgehammer to the face no matter how happy he claimed he was.

Ellie finds him holding the monkey one day. It's been crammed into his old leather satchel in the back bottom corner of the wardrobe for two years; when she comes into the bedroom calling his name, she finds him there sitting on the bed with the thing in his hand. It's all loose floppy limbs and gormless embroidered expression. He hates it. He's always hated it, it's just so
stupid
. He used to spin out huge elaborate daydreams about throwing it on the fire or unpicking a seam and unravelling it row by row until it's nothing but a heap of twisted wool and stuffing. For two years he's barely thought of it at all. Today he saw its foot by accident when he dropped some coat hangers and dislodged the unbuckled flap of the bag, and he brought it out with every intention of getting rid of the fucking thing for good - but that was twenty minutes ago and he's not got any further than sitting on the bed turning the monkey over in his hands, feeling the loops of knit and purl under his fingers.